May 17, 2019

Parkitect - a management game

I'm currently working on a management game so I thought it was a good idea to play-test some other management games and try to figure out what I would have done differently. First out in the play-test series is Parkitect which is a game where you manage your own theme park.

Perhaps the most common management games throughout the ages are city builders like SimCity and theme park games. Parkitect is one of the latest in the series and was released in 2018 after some years of development and a successful Kickstarter campaign. The players have rated it mostly positively on Steam.

Parkitect is made with Unity game engine, which is the same game engine I'm using. It's running on a grid, like in the old days, so the entire map is divided into square cells, so you can't build curvy roads like you can in the game Planet Coaster, which is another recently released theme park management game. But using a grid is not necessarily a bad idea because the game still looks good because they are not aiming for a realistic art style - more of a retro art style. The retro art style is also making the game run faster on my laptop, which is not the worst laptop but still far from the best. I saw a video of someone playing Planet Coaster, which has a more detailed art style, and that person had to stop playing the game because the computer couldn't handle all details even though the map wasn't fully built. You can fill the entire map in Parkitect and the game is still running fine.

Parkitect has a campaign where you play scenarios provided by the game developers. For example, your job is to build a theme park on a deserted airfield and you win if you get 500 customers or whatever the goal is. Each scenario has different goals, but it still feels like the goals are the same after you have figured out what to build to attract new customers. You are basically doing the same on each map: you are trying to make the park-guests happy. They want different type of attractions, they want food, they need toilets, they want the park to be free from garbage, and they want the park to look nice. After a while you have learned what you need to build to make them happy and then you build the same thing over and over again. So you shouldn't play it to get a challenge - you should play it because the game is relaxing.

So why isn't the game challenging? The game has a weather system - sometimes it will rain for maybe a day - and the temperature changes. But I haven't noticed that the temperature affects the customers because they happily ride in the fastest, highest roller coaster even though the temperature is around freezing temperature. Some indoor attractions are more popular when it's raining, but because it's raining for just a day you are never noticing the difference. Neither is the water turning into ice (I tried by dropping a guest into the water so yes you can kill guests) and it's raining even though it should snow. So I think they should have utilized the weather system to make the scenarios more different from each other. If you have a weather system, make sure it affects the game. In this image, the temperature is below freezing, but the game looks and acts exactly the same as when the temperature is 20+ degrees:

To make the guests happy, you need to make sure they can buy food. This is something I was really surprised they added to the game: they have "haulers" that will carry boxes of food to the small restaurants when they are out of food. Most other games assume that the small restaurants have some endless amount of food supply. The problem is that your guest hates to see these haulers so you have to build special access roads to the restaurants so they can deliver boxes without any guest seeing it. You also have to hide these access roads because the guests don't want to see them. So what Parkitect does is that they will provide you with a decoration map so you can see where the guests don't like the looks of your park:

I read through the Parkitect development blog and they are using ray-casting to determine if the decoration is low or not. In the image above, they fire a ray (which is similar to a laser) from the stairs and some rays hit the pink delivery box system, which is considered ugly in the game. So when I added fences around the pink building, the red disappeared. Anyway, the pink building is connected to the main warehouse through an underground pipeline system, which looks like this:

The problem with this pipeline system is that it's annoying to build because it's running in 3d and the heights have to be the same for it to connect. It's often difficult to judge at what height the pipeline system is, so you will sometimes need many attempts to make them connect. What I would have done differently is to have the pipes at just one height, like Cities: Skylines sewer system. Sometimes you have to build pipes above areas you don't control, but it could have easily been solved by allowing pipes below the area you don't control.

To make your guests happy, you have to make the attractions you build look good, so Parkitect has given each attraction a decoration parameter that can be low, medium, etc. So after you build a roller-coaster you have to use one of the several building blocks to make it look better. This is sometimes confusing. For example, this roller-coaster has low decoration even though I've added rocks, flowers, special fences, and space-style buildings:

The decoration suddenly turned to medium after adding this building in the middle:

This ride also had medium decoration:

So what's the difference? I suspect they are again using ray-casting to determine level of decoration and because the roller-coaster is larger it needs decoration not just at the entrance. But the problem is that it's kinda confusing for the player, so they should maybe have added some color map to show where on the attraction the decoration is low.

To make you guests happy, you have to build different types of attraction. I've notices that they complain if you don't have an attraction with high intensity, and if you build one you will get more customers. One odd behavior I've notices is that some attractions are not popular at all. For example, this ride is free but the queue is almost empty:

So an improvement could have been to tell why no-one wants to ride the attraction. In the image above, it has nothing to do with the type of attraction because it was really popular in another scenario. But now almost no-one wants to touch it even though it's free. And sometimes you see that your new expensive roller coaster is empty while the queue to the Ferris wheel is full.

The game gives you a list of what your guests like and don't like while visiting the park. Sometimes they complain they are broke, which can be confusing because you can add cash machines, so you are not really sure why they are complaining.

Another problem I discovered involves the absence of pathfinding. If you destroy a path while guests are walking on it, the guests begin to walk in a random direction hoping to find a path to walk on. But sometimes they are not finding their way back because they just walk randomly. A better way would have been to do some pathfinding back do the nearest road, which is doable because the entire map is a grid and you know which tiles are roads, so a flow field algorithm would have been a fast solution.

To summarize: Parkitect is a relaxing game that's running fine even if you have an older computer. It has some game mechanics you can't find in other theme park management games. Some game mechanics are confusing and should have been easier to understand, and the game could have been more challenging to attract players who want more of a challenge after learning the basics.

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